January 31, 2002

Get Your Nuts

Welcome ladies, gentlemen, and nominees, to the Biggest Nutcases in Sports Awards, held right here in Cleveland Browns Stadium, home of the Dawg Pound. Your host tonight will be none other than Nate Newton, whose probation officer was kind enough to let him be here.

Let’s get right to the action. The envelopes, please…

We’ll start with football, Nate’s sport of choice before he entered the wonderful world of drug smuggling. Patriots wide receiver Terry Glenn takes the honors after a season of whining, exaggerating, and not helping the Pats on their road to New Orleans.

Glenn was suspended for four games at the beginning of the season for missing an NFL-mandated drug test. Then Glenn went AWOL after the NFL suspension. Coach Bill Belichick and the team shelved him for the whole season for that shenanigan. But an arbitrator overturned New England’s suspension, and Glenn returned to play in a game. He missed the next six games with a possibly exaggerated knee injury, and then a game after that due to another suspension. The Patriots suspended him for the playoffs due to “multiple unexcused absences,” which sounds like something a high schooler does. So, now that his team is in the Super Bowl without him, Glenn decided to sue the NFL yesterday. What a team player.

Moving on to basketball. We’ll give this year’s award to the master of the perennial outburst, the legendary Bob Knight. New team, same red sweater, same old incidents.

He’s coaching Texas Tech now, after Indiana couldn’t take his antics anymore. While his team puts together a good season, Knight has still lashed out at the media and others surrounding the Red Raiders. Earlier this year, after a Texas Tech win over Houston in the Compaq Center, Knight complained to the media that their locker room would have been cramped “for four midgets.” Then Knight allegedly challenged the Compaq Center’s manager, Jerry McDonald, to a fight. Knight has also stopped talking to a local beat writer, apparently because the writer wrote something displeasing to Knight. He’s 61 years old, and he’s piling up the Nutcase Awards. Way to go, coach.

On to the frozen pond. Marty McSorley hasn’t been heard from in the NHL since he bludgeoned Donald Brashear with his stick, and so we’ll have to give this year’s hockey Nutcase Award to another goon: the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Tie Domi.

Domi, whose name is an anagram of “me idiot,” got into an altercation last season with a fan — during a game. I can see this happening in other sports, where the fans and players aren’t separated by much. But in hockey, there’s an eight-foot high barrier between the players and the stands. Domi, who was in his usual place in the penalty box, had heard enough from a Flyers fan who was heckling him. So he turned around and squirted the fan with his water bottle. Next thing you know, the fan was leaning over the glass, falling through the glass, and Domi was giving him a beating right there in the box. Domi described the whole fiasco as “old-time hockey.” Even before this incident, which seemed to come right out of “Slap Shot,” Domi has had his brushes with craziness. He sucker-punched Ulf Samuelsson once and knocked him out cold, and he also has been accused of calling Sandy McCarthy, who is part Native American, various racial slurs. He’s obviously not the best ambassador for the game, and so this Nutcase Award is for you, Mr. Domi.

Rounding out the four major sports is baseball, where this year’s award recipient is Carl Everett, Texas Ranger.

While he was in Boston, Everett was a Rich Garces-sized distraction to the team. His feuds with GM Dan Duquette (who isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box, either) were constantly in the media. Did I mention Everett is a former wife-beater? Serious Nutcase Award points there. The guy also refuses to believe that dinosaurs ever existed, because the Bible doesn’t mention them. Hey Carl, the Bible doesn’t mention the fact that the Red Sox haven’t won a World Series in the past 80 years either, but I bet you believe that. It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes Everett and his new teammate, John Rocker, to get in some sort of altercation in the Rangers’ clubhouse. The over-under is four weeks into the season.

We can’t forget the rest of the sports world in this show, so we’ll hand out awards in some other athletic endeavors. First off, bowling. Pete Weber, PBA Hall of Famer, can take a Nutcase Award back to the lanes. He’s never been selected as PBA Player of the Year, “a fact that many attribute to his ‘bad boy’ persona,” according to the official PBA web site. He’s been suspended numerous times, most notably for an incident in 2000 when he attacked a fan. Weber was suspended from the pro tour for 10 months.

This next award may well be the weirdest one we give out. In the soccer world, outlandish goal celebrations are common. But this one is just too bizarre. In a game in November, Francisco Gallardo, a midfielder for Spanish team Sevilla, celebrated a goal by teammate Jose Antonio Reyes by — get this — putting his head between Reyes’s legs and biting his genitals. This really happened. I saw a picture and cringed. And apparently, Gallardo considered this act normal. “It was something between friends that I thought would have no importance until this morning when I got up and saw all the commotion in the news,” he said the day after the chomp. While you think about what constitutes “something between friends,” you can take home this Nutcase Award, Francisco.

Of course, we have to save the best (or worst) for last. The boxing award is a complete no-brainer, and we’ll give it to the incomparable Mike Tyson. This guy has a rap sheet longer than Lennox Lewis’s wingspan, and it never stops growing. Let’s see: From juvenile delinquent to wife-beater to convicted rapist to ear biter, and now, he brawls with Lewis at a press conference. In the brawl, he supposedly bit Lewis’s leg. I could write a whole column on Iron Mike’s spotted history, but for now, we’ll let the award speak for itself.

I guess you don’t congratulate these award winners. Some of them are bad people, some of them just aren’t running on all eight cylinders. Some of them have stories that entertain, others have stories that just disappoint. Whatever the case, this concludes this year’s edition of the Nutcase Awards. See you next year.

This is the "wpengine" admin user that our staff uses to gain access to your admin area to provide support and troubleshooting. It can only be accessed by a button in our secure log that auto generates a password and dumps that password after the staff member has logged in. We have taken extreme measures to ensure that our own user is not going to be misused to harm any of our clients sites.

Related

Although the University’s pending lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard may not be resolved in the near future, Cornell students will not be affected, according to University officials. Henrik N. Dullea ’61, vice president of University relations, stated that the lawsuit “creates tensions within the corporation and the University.” However, he added that the suit would not affect student recruitment by the corporation. “The company will continue to recruit [Cornell] graduates because it is in their interest to do so,” Dullea said. “This is an isolated patent issue,” said Patricia McClary, University Counsel. “Equipment [on campus] will not be affected.” The University is suing Hewlett-Packard for a patent infringement of Professor Emeritus H.C. Torng’s work (US Patent No. 4,807,115). Damages could potentially exceed $100 million, according to Cornell News Services. Cornell filed a complaint against Hewlett Packard on Dec. 27, 2001, but the issue may not be resolved for ‘a very long time,” according to Dullea. “Patent infringement is not unusual. In most cases, the company using the idea works with you on a licensing agreement and it doesn’t come to a disagreement. Litigation is unusual, but licensing is not,” said Dullea. For example, Intel Corp. has a licensing agreement with the University. Intel recognized Torng’s work and named Torng the first Intel Academic Research Fellow. Torng’s invention, which took him twenty years to complete, accelerates a computer’s processing speed.To describe his invention, Torng used a metaphor of the New York Thruway. “Think of a New York Thruway where there is one lane and when one car stalls, all other cars are stuck,” he said. “Each [computer instruction] is like a car. I looked beyond stalled instructions to see if any other instructions could be processed [simultaneously].” Torng, a retired professor, began his work in the 1960’s and patented his invention in the early 1980’s. Torng was a professor at Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering during the time of the research. He stated he was not at liberty to comment on the actual lawsuit. The Hewlett-Packard patent suit is not the first of its kind for the University. The University also has a lawsuit pending against Zeiss Optical Company, a corporation that produces lenses for microscopes and telescopes, according to Dullea. University counsel James J. Mingle, and Robert Lee Constable, dean for computing and information, did not wish to comment on the Hewlett-Packard lawsuit. Mingle only stated that the University had filed a complaint. Hewlett-Packard’s legal department was not available for comment. According to Dullea, Hewlett-Packard is “challenging the patent itself.” From a student perspective, Jordan Erenrich ’02, the president of the Association of Computer Science Undergraduates said, “I find it very reassuring that discoveries and research are protected by Cornell.” Archived article by Jamie Yonks

The women’s gymnastics team is on a roll. In the first month of the season, the team has already set its second and third highest scores ever. Its third place ranking in the ECAC puts the Red gymnasts in a position they have not seen in ten years. Having only ranked as high as sixth in seasons passed, the team is on pace to finish with its highest ranking ever. Despite its early success, coach Paul Beckwith assures that the team has not lost its focus. “The ranking is a boost of confidence. But, we have a ten meet season. We don’t have a week off from mid-January to the end of March, so we have to keep getting up for the meets.” The team ranks third in the ECAC in both average and highest score and has had some individual success as well. Following the lead of freshman teammate Shellen Goltz earlier this season, freshman Megan Miller was named Rookie of the Week by the ECAC for her efforts at UMass. She has consistently scored 9.7 or higher on the bars and ranks first in the ECAC in that category. Into New Hampshire The Red gymnastics team plans on extending its winning ways tomorrow when it competes in the New Hampshire Invitational. “I think we’re ready,” Beckwith said. “We belong in the meet. We get better every week. There are a couple of spots up in the air that will be decided during warmup. If we go in and hit everything, we’ve reached our goal.” Beckwith sees the weekend as another opportunity to improve. “We plan on beating Temple. To beat New Hampshire, we’ll need one of our best meets ever. But, we’ll mostly be thinking about our performance. We’re going after scores.”Archived article by Adam Matthews